Paper Presentation V:
Problems and Challenges in Women’s Football
Saturday, April 10, 14.15–16.15

David Romijn
The Netherlands

Football in the Netherlands is the most popular (largely voluntary organized) club sport. With more than 1.1 million members, the Royal Dutch Football Association (KNVB) is the biggest of the country. However, only nine percent of these members is female (107.000 in 2008). These members are spread over 1.700 clubs in the country. This means that about half of the clubs in the Netherlands in some way supports women soccer.  Especially in the last decade there was an enormous  increase of girls and women playing football.  In particular young girls are finding their way to the football clubs more easily. While the number of adult women remained almost at the same level, the participation of girls aged 5-18 in club football doubled in the last ten years from a small 30.000 to over 60.000. The KNVB has a co-education policy for young girls: all youth competitions in the age class between  5-14 years are mixed. 

Because of these developments, the KNVB requested a research about the developments and current situation in Dutch women’s football.

- In what way is women’s football integrated and accepted within the clubs and in what ways are they represented at board level and within the technical staff?
- How can clubs set up women’s football within their own club? And what ingredients are necessary for a sound development of women’s football at club level?
 - What are the effects of having female members on the rest of the football club?

In order to give answers to these questions we interviewed about 30 football club board members about their experiences on and perceptions of these matters.  Most of them were directly involved with women’s football at their club, and some were more remotely connected.

The research resulted in the following conclusions;
- Girls and women playing football are nowadays much more accepted  within clubs and in society at large (parents)
- Women’s football is still very much depending on men as board members, coaches and volunteers
- Good performances improve the status and acceptation of women’s football within the club
- Women change the club in a material (membership-fee, canteen turnover) and an immaterial (social interaction; moral behavior) way
- Talented girls benefit playing in mixed teams and competitions, but clubs also plead for girls only teams and competitions to be more gender inclusive
- Solutions for recognized problems within girls and women’s football (dressing rooms, quality of technical staff, sponsoring) are hardly structurally dealt with and embedded within a broader club policy 

An exemplary illustration of the current position of women’s football is the following quotation of one of the board members talking about the current situation at her football club; “The women within our club are now at a wonderful second place. Just behind the men.”